Robert Caplin for The New York Times
M. Wells Dinette is a cafeteria in MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. Almost everything about the dining room suggests a classroom. More Photos »
WHEN M. Wells, a tin-can diner on a windswept corner of Long Island City, Queens, closed in the summer of 2011, its operators blamed its demise on a rent increase. I never believed it. The more likely explanation, it seemed to me, is that the restaurant had to die so New York could live.
As a light beginning to your meal, you could start with a half-dozen fat snails stuffed into the melting marrow of a long shaft of shinbone. After that delicate snack, you could get a little more serious by ordering an entire meatloaf with stroganoff gravy, spaetzle and foie gras. This tower of meat was meant to be shared by four people, but you could round out the meal with slices of buttered brioche weighted down with even more foie gras. That was a side dish.
M. Wells posed a danger to more than the heart and arteries, though. Its chef, Hugue Dufour, advocated an approach to dining that was a threat to the work ethic that has made the city prosperous since it was called New Amsterdam. The gleefully unrestrained portions and liberal doses of fat and meat were an invitation to eat too much at lunch, get drunk in the afternoon, sleep it off for a while, resume consciousness again at dinner and call in sick the next day. If enough people had fallen into the M. Wells lifestyle, the city would have ground to a halt and our economy would look like Greece’s.
But New York must have an immune system that keeps it safe from destabilizing outside influences, because M. Wells lasted just more than a year before the steak knives and the foie gras vanished from the scene.
Two months ago, Mr. Dufour and his wife and business partner, Sarah Obraitis, returned to haunt our 60-hour workweeks and our plans to live to retirement age with M. Wells Dinette, a new cafeteria inside MoMA PS1 in Long Island City. In homage to the building’s past as a red brick schoolhouse, the dining area is set up like a classroom. There are long shared desks with composition notebooks tucked beneath the surface and even a few of those chairs with a built-in writing surface; others have a cage for books under the seat.
More forgiving than the restaurant it attempts to reprise, M. Wells Dinette is closed for dinner and seems to have scaled back its portions ever so slightly for daytime eating. But Mr. Dufour did not return to the kitchen to make cucumber sandwiches.
One weekend, a goat had been drawn on the menu chalkboard, its heart and other organs instructively labeled. (Another blackboard lists the wines, many of them French and all of them very helpful in putting away Mr. Dufour’s cuisine.) The kitchen had bought a goat, butchered it, and was selling off the pieces.
By the time I got to the dinette on Sunday morning, just one leg and the liver were left. I chose the liver. With a rustic French sauce of vermouth and lardons, a mess of caramelized onions and a cushion of mashed potatoes holding everything in place, it was staggeringly hearty, the kind of thing you’d want to eat before setting off on a three-day bowhunting trip in Alaska.
If my hemoglobin count had still been low after that liver, and I was still hungry, I might have followed it with the blood pudding. This big slab, the color of a just-dug beet, was crunchy on the outside, with an iron-rich tang that was softened and sweetened by a buttery apple mustard.
The menus, which change daily, can be read as methodical studies in the uses of animal fat. Cured pork belly binds an expertly made terrine of rabbit shot through with pink ovals of foie gras. The rich oils of smoked herring bring depth to a surprisingly light Caesar salad with broccoli.
One of my companions described the thin slices of fried bread served with a classic brandade as “crisp butter.” There is also smooth, spreadable butter, on an open-face sandwich of bottarga served with a shot glass of the anise-flavored spirit arak, and flaky layered butter in the crust on a slice of Mr. Dufour’s justifiably renowned Québécois meat pie, which overflows with the flesh of four or five species of animal.
A native of Quebec, Mr. Dufour learned his blithe disregard for moderation while cooking at Au Pied de Cochon in Montreal, where he was also the pastry chef and an owner. Most of the time, his celebration of the unbridled joy of eating like a lumberjack is so convincing that I’d be prepared to split cordwood all day just to earn the right to pull up a chair.
